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Lenovo has released patches to fix critical Wi-Fi vulnerabilities

Lenovo informed customers on Friday that two critical Broadcom vulnerabilities (Identified as CVE-2017-11120 and CVE-2017-11121) affect 25 models of its common ThinkPad brand.

The two vulnerabilities were discovered by security researchers from Google Project Zero and first revealed in September 2017, they were only reported to affect specific Broadcom chipsets applied in Apple iPhones, Apple TV and Android devices.

The researcher of Google Project Zero demonstrated that an attacker inside Wi-Fi range could exploit CVE-2017-11120, an out-of-bounds write issue, to perform arbitrary code execution on an affected device.

According to the researcher: “Upon successful execution of the exploit, a backdoor is inserted into the firmware, allowing remote read/write commands to be issued to the firmware via crafted action frames (thus allowing easy remote control over the Wi-Fi chip),”

The CVE-2017-11121 bug, which is a buffer overflow vulnerability caused by improper validation of Wi-Fi signals. This could lead to remote code execution as well.

Lenovo said last week: “Broadcom has issued an advisory for certain Broadcom WiFi controllers used by many computer and device makers, which contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities on the adapter (not the system CPU)”

ThinkPad clients are recommended by Lenovo to update their Wi-Fi driver to the latest version.